Electronic commerce is an increasingly popular way of conducting business and selling items to customers. Customers are able to efficiently identify and purchase a wide variety of items, including both goods and services, over computer networks, including the Internet. The same goods and services can be offered by multiple sellers, each with its own conditions of sales (e.g., taxes, shipping charges, promotions, rebates, etc.), allowing a customer to quickly and easily select an item from a given seller with the desired sales conditions.
In many sales systems, individual small sellers come together under the umbrella of a larger seller and sell through the system of the larger seller. In such systems, however, a problem often arises of how to construct a user interface (UI) that can display to the consumer all of the items that are offered by the individual, smaller sellers. Where multiple individual sellers offer similar items of varying characteristics, the larger seller is faced with the decision of how to best display all of the items so that a consumer can quickly and easily choose the desired item.
Currently, one option has been to display every variation of every item from every seller. This option is distracting to the consumer because he is forced to filter through individual variations to determine which seller is selling which specific item. This process overburdens a consumer and in today's competitive market, the consumer will not likely take the effort to perform this process. Instead, the consumer will search and purchase the item in a different location.
There exist other problems that can be encountered by larger sellers displaying all the items being offered for sale by smaller, individual sellers. The UI strategies and methods used by the larger sellers are cumbersome and typically require manual input to monitor the information displayed about all of the various items in a timely manner. Indeed, it is not unusual for a larger seller to offer thousands of items at any given time. However, adjusting the UIs for each one require expensive time and manual effort. Such problems are compounded because new sellers are offering items for sale at an increasing pace.